[plug] the west

[Christian]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 07:39:05PM +0800, alan howard wrote:
> has any one read nick millers article on page 49 ( classified section) of 
> todays west ?

Yeah, generally not a bad article except I don't think most of us are
paranoid. :-)

The only bit I really objected to was the suggestion I was making
"excuses" when I suggested Windows couldn't really do video editing
properly.  This wasn't just some "paranoid" excuse-seeking claim.  As I
said in the same email, my old man has spent 100's of hours trying to
get video capture and editing working on his home machine.  To date he
has been forced to do things ranging from pulling most of the hardware
out of the machine and setting up different hardware configurations that
only run subsets of the machine's hardware to complete reformating and
reinstallation.  He's no programmer but he's been using DOS et al on PCs
for over 10 years and has probably spent more time tweaking Windows than
most people.  My argument is that if his experience is even partially
related to what doing video editing work on Windows is like, its a fair
argument that Windows simply cannot do this reliably.  The average user
(let alone business!) wouldn't spend the amount of time on it that he has
nor have the necessary expertise to try all the things he has so that,
in my mind, suggests that Windows ability to do this sort of work for
the majority of its users is severely limited.

Anyway, on to my experiences with trying to set up video editing etc. on
the same machine under Linux.  I installed and compiled the 2.4.3 kernel
which supposedly supports ieee1394.  Rebooted.  All the usual familiar
messages from 2.2.x plus some cool sounding new ones then it gets to the
firewire board detection bit... And guess what... gets it first time!
If you take away downloading and compiling time I've probably spend
about 5 minutes on it so far.  At this stage I'd say Linux is far ahead
of Windows.

Installed gscanbus software which just tests whether the ieee1394 bus
works or not.  It's got a fairly spartan and esoteric interface but
after a few minutes of fiddling it works too.  I can use some on-screen
controls to control the camera.  The program doesn't do anything useful
but at least I know it's all working.

Next I try the dvgrab software which is supposedly to pull down DV
from the camera and save it as AVI.  I run it and nothing happens.  I
kill it and check the size of the file.  Empty.  I fiddle a bit more,
re-read the manual and run it again.  Same thing.  Check the FAQ and
message board and find lots of people with the identical problem and the
answer seems to be a buggy kernel although it's not the version I have.
Read a bit further and, in the detailed descriptions of what one user
says he is doing he mentions pressing "Play" on the video camera (which
I wasn't doing).  Run dvgrab again pressing Play this time and it works.
Was that in the manual and I just completely missed it or is it just
realy obvious to anyone who knows anything about DV cameras (not me)?

So I try to load the new AVI file into xanim.  No luck.  Try the various
frontends like gxanim and aktion -- same.  Try aviplay and Broadcast
2000 with the same result.  Maybe dvgrab didn't work?  I boot into
Windows and try playing the AVI there and it works.  At this stage I've
got no idea why it doesn't play under Linux although I'm open to
suggestions.  However, in about 1/50th of the time taken under Windows
I've managed to get Linux to talk to the DV camera and successfully pull
down video.  For now I'm going to leave it because I just don't have
time to spare at the moment (plus by doing a complete reformat/reinstall
plus about 20 hours of coaxing, Dad has managed to get Windows to
work... although only with the network card disabled) but I'm sometime
I'm going to try and compile the other pieces of software I've found to
do this stuff.  Last time I tried there seemed to be some problem with
the libraries so maybe I've got the wrong versions of the header files
or something.

Regards,

Christian.

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DSA 0x0EC1D28C: BBCB 0D79 4EBB 078A A066  7267 8BED E9D6 0EC1 D28C